As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs; Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery; the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn; the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket; and even Jo, the destitute little crossing-sweeper. A savage, but often comic, indictment of a society that is rotten to the core, Bleak House is one of Dickens's most ambitious novels, with a range that extends from the drawing rooms of the aristocracy to the poorest of London slums.

Speaking on a personal level, I have to say that this is my favorite novel, by my favourite author. The first chapter's description of a foggy London has come to epitomise Victorian London for many. The characterisation is magnificent; the plots and sub-plots fascinating and complex. This is no easy read, but a novel which can be read and re-read for a lifetime, with each re-reading revealing new depths to it (which I guess is as good a definition of "great literature" as any).

This is a new version of the book, with the 40 original illustrations by "Phiz" and much better formatting than the previous versions, with dashes preserved.

Thoroughly proof-read against the "Oxford Illustrated Dickens" edition. Many errors fixed, and a huge amount of missing punctuation (in the order of 20,000 items) added and corrected. All the illustrations have been re-scanned and are now of much better quality than before. Various things such as letters have been replaced with graphical versions, which look much better. I would now regard this as a "finished" version; if you find any remaining errors, now matter how small, please let me know. Uploaded v7.

Previous download count: 1737

This work is assumed to be in the Life+70 public domain OR the copyright holder has given specific permission for distribution. Copyright laws differ throughout the world, and it may still be under copyright in some countries. Before downloading, please check your country's copyright laws. If the book is under copyright in your country, do not download or redistribute this work.

I love Dickens (the "big" ones like David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, etc.), and even bought a nice bound Dickens complete library collection with heavy duty library binding. Those books seem boring to me for the first 50-100 pages or so, but wow they are incredible once you know the characters a little bit and understand what's going on. Definitely worth the effort!

But I had trouble getting into some of the works like Pickwick Papers, so never really came back to it. They are long ago buried in boxes that are in my garage now (I don't have much storage space in my small townhouse). But I think you've given me the inspiration to give him another try with this version of Bleak House. I'll put it on my Reader tonight. Thanks!

The main "problem" with Dickens, to my mind, is that teenagers are force-fed his books in school, and that puts them off him for life. He's very much an "adult" author and you need to be an adult reader to appreciate his biting wit and social comment. I just think he's an amazing author, and "Bleak House" is my favourite one of his books.

The author should be "Dickens, Charles" instead of "Charles Dickens". Much easier to look for Dickens at the letter D than the letter C ;-)

OK - thanks. I'll do all my future uploads in that format. I'll wait for a while and see if anyone wants any other changes before re-uploading this one.

I believe there are tools which allow you to edit the author of non-DRM LRF files, are there not?

I want to re-upload at some point, anyway, because I had to remove the nice "front page" illustration to get the file down to under 5MB, which is currently the largest file it's possible to upload. Alex has promised to change the limit to 10MB, so when that happens I'll put the missing illustration back in, change the author as you suggest, and re-upload.

Thanks for the feedback - it's always very welcome!

Can I just ask, by the way - do people think that the illustrations "add value" to books like this over the plain PG versions? I find them fascinating, personally - they give you a real "snapshot" of the time the book was written in - but if people think it's all a waste of time I won't bother .

I plan to do illustrated versions of a number of other Dickens books over the next few days, by the way. "Oliver Twist" next.

You mean leave the name of the author on the title page as "Charles Dickens", but set the author name that shows up in the Reader as "Dickens, Charles"? Yes, that's exactly what I would do. I certainly wouldn't change the name that appears on the first page of the book - that would look silly!

Can I just ask, by the way - do people think that the illustrations "add value" to books like this over the plain PG versions? I find them fascinating, personally - they give you a real "snapshot" of the time the book was written in - but if people think it's all a waste of time I won't bother .

I already got all Charles Dickens works. The illustrations are the reason I downloaded your version. And, of course , the fact that you have done wonderful work in converting this book into the sony reader format.

And, of course , the fact that you have done wonderful work in converting this book into the sony reader format.

No, that's easy - it's "Book Designer" that does all the hard work. This book was pretty trivial to convert, because it started as a nicely-formatted HTML version. All I had to do was go through a printed version (I have a nice illustrated "Complete Works" of Dickens) and find out where all the illustrations went (it's not always obvious from their captions!).

If credit is due, please give it to the author of "Book Designer" for giving us such an amazing tool to use!

Thanks for sharing this. I'm impressed by what you've done so far -- but because Book Designer won't let us load an .lrf file directly, it's hard to learn how you got effects like the footers, etc. Would it be possible for you to upload the source in htm or another readable format so we can follow in your footsteps!?

The main "problem" with Dickens, to my mind, is that teenagers are force-fed his books in school, and that puts them off him for life. He's very much an "adult" author and you need to be an adult reader to appreciate his biting wit and social comment.

His novels aren't exactly the right place to find that, though. He did write a number of shorter essays, published as 'The Uncommercial Traveller', which tend to be much better reads. Unfortunately they start off with Dickens at his most pathetical over the shipwreck of 'The Royal Charter'. The eighth story -- The Cargo of the Tasmania, I think -- is a must-read: it's on the maltreatment of soldiers who were (at first at least) considered to be deserters and shipped to England. No pathos here, only sharp satire.